July 2021 Summaries

The webinar discusses the proliferation of specialized databases in enterprises and how this leads to complexity. Industry analyst Rick van der Lans explains that copying data is the root cause of this complexity, resulting in high-latency data, interference on transactional systems, and difficulties in ensuring consistency and security. However, a unified database like SingleStore offers a solution by combining transactional and analytical capabilities, allowing for merged data architectures and reducing the need for data copying. The product's features, such as skip lists, strong consistency, fast data injection, and Universal Storage, enable faster query performance and support for both transactions and analytics. By adopting a unified database, organizations can simplify their data architectures, reduce latency, and improve agility.

Suresh Sathyamurthy, SingleStore's SVP of Marketing & Growth, shares his first few months in his role, highlighting the company's industry recognition and positive peer reviews. He recalls a conversation with a customer that convinced him to join SingleStore due to its unique capabilities. The company has received several awards and recognitions from reputable firms such as Dresner Advisory Services, Forrester, TrustRadius, and Gartner Peer Insight Reviews. These recognitions are attributed to SingleStore's focus on solving tough business challenges and delivering value to customers. Sathyamurthy expresses his gratitude for the recognition and invites readers to try the product at no cost or join the company as it continues to grow rapidly.

The streaming media industry is experiencing explosive growth, with a 44% increase in viewership in Q4 2019 compared to Q4 2020. To keep up with this rapid growth, streaming media providers face significant data analytics challenges, often referred to as the "Wild West." This challenge stems from the need for fast and efficient processing of large amounts of data in real-time, while also providing a personalized user experience. Traditional infrastructure is not well-suited for these demands, but modern cloud-based systems with elastic computing and scale-out relational databases are better equipped to handle the spikes in traffic and provide low-latency analytics. The industry is moving towards a more personal level of personalization, where data-intensive analytics play a crucial role in serving customers' needs and improving customer experience.

We added Cypress and React Testing Library UI tests to our web platform, starting from having no automated UI tests. We set up an infrastructure for end-to-end testing with Cypress, which mimics our production environment and can be spun up in our CI system. We also started using React Testing Library for integration tests, which are great because they run faster than Cypress tests, allow us to check smaller parts of the UI, and simulate errors and edge cases. To develop a culture of testing, we had an internal workshop, created an internal wiki page with step-by-step instructions, and addressed difficulties in testing directly in code reviews. We're continuously looking at other testing tools and strive for a healthy testing culture that increases our confidence in the quality of our product.

SingleStore has introduced a new feature called "bottomless" in its 7.5 release, which enables separation of storage and compute in databases, similar to the way consumers can store and access photos in the cloud. This allows for low-latency transactions and improved performance for data-intensive applications. By storing only the data being queried and separating compute from storage, SingleStore aims to provide a more efficient and scalable solution than traditional database approaches. The feature is designed to benefit real-world applications, such as analytics, by eliminating the need for backups and reducing latency associated with transactions.

GoGuardian, an education technology platform, faced significant challenges in managing its digital learning environment due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The company needed a unified database solution that could handle high-throughput traffic, support upsert use cases, and provide fast aggregate reads. After exploring various options such as SQL, Druid, Phoenix, BigQuery, Presto, Amazon Athena, Spanner, and SingleStoreDB, GoGuardian discovered SingleStoreDB as the ideal solution. This cloud-native unified database offered row and column data stores in the same database, high availability, speed, friendly support, and supported GoGuardian's upsert use case. With SingleStoreDB, GoGuardian achieved an average throughput of 2.49 million events per minute, write throughput of 750,000 per second, read throughput of 400 per minute, and <30ms latency for some queries, resulting in a cost savings of $30,000 per month compared to legacy solutions.

IEX Cloud, a financial data delivery platform, overcame technical challenges by adopting SingleStoreDB, a unified database designed for speed, scale, and agility. The platform provides high-quality financial data to developers, Fintechs, and enterprises, enabling them to build innovative applications and services. IEX Cloud's partnership with SingleStoreDB has enabled the company to expand its data offerings, improve performance, and reduce costs, ultimately providing a more efficient and accessible financial data delivery model. With SingleStoreDB, IEX Cloud can now support millions of users and provide real-time data updates, making it an attractive solution for financial organizations seeking to modernize their technology and deliver high-quality data to their customers.

SingleStore's unified database can address performance bottlenecks in traditional data warehouses, such as chronic sluggishness due to streaming data ingestion, long ETL batch windows, query latencies, and high concurrency. By augmenting these patterns with SingleStore, customers can achieve ultra-fast data ingestion, super-low latency, and high concurrency, enabling fast analytics and sub-millisecond performance at-scale. This is achieved through three key capabilities: ultra-fast data ingestion, super-low latencies, and high concurrency. Customers can use SingleStore to augment their data warehouses in various ways, including using it as a data mart, implementing the Lambda architecture for fast analytics, or combining both patterns with the Fast or Lambda Plus architecture. These solutions have been successfully implemented by leading companies across diverse industries, resulting in significant improvements in performance and user experience.

dailyVest, a FinTech company, developed a platform to improve investment and performance reporting for recordkeepers, plan sponsors, and plan participants. The company's executive management team has a long history in the financial services industry and previously founded an industry-respected retirement products software company, Viga Technologies. dailyVest's first project was a commercial engine that calculated a plan participant's investment performance based on their transaction history and resulting cash flows. The company needed to move its platform from Azure SQL to a cloud-based infrastructure due to scalability and cost issues. After evaluating several options, dailyVest chose SingleStore Helios, which offered improved performance, scale, and agility without the headaches of installing and maintaining software. With Singlestore Helios, dailyVest achieved substantial performance improvements, ranging from 12.4% up to 94.5%, a 35% reduction in total cost of ownership, and improved data security. The company is now looking forward to the 7.5 update for SingleStore Helios, which will add functionality such as storage and compute separation, resource pools, point-in-time recovery, UPSERT operations on columnstores, and more.

SingleStore has launched its hybrid multi-cloud, unified analytical and transactional database, marking a significant milestone in its journey. The company has also unveiled its first Innovation Center in Raleigh, NC, called the SingleStore Launch Pad, with the mission to reduce friction in digital transformation efforts. At the launch event, Bailey Hayes, Principal Software Engineer, discussed the work of the Launch Pad team, including their focus on bringing universal language support to SingleStore's database engine through Web Assembly (WASM). WASM allows users to write once and run anywhere, across different languages, operating systems, and environments. The team is also exploring ways to integrate machine learning algorithms with data, enabling businesses to analyze data without specialized programming resources. With the launch of this technology, SingleStore aims to empower business users to directly analyze data, unlocking endless possibilities for data-driven decision-making.

SingleStore recently announced its 7.5 release, which marks a significant milestone in the industry by introducing the world's first hybrid multi-cloud, unified analytical and transactional database. This new category of database addresses both analytical and transactional workloads for today's multi-cloud world, providing separation of storage and compute, point-in-time recovery, and universal storage with multicolumn key support. The CEO, Raj Verma, emphasized the need to address database sprawl and enterprise complexity, highlighting SingleStore's ability to unshackle enterprises from these complexities through its no-compromise database approach. Additionally, SingleStore introduced patented Universal Storage, which allows developers to focus on solving problems without worrying about data models. This marks a shift towards modern economics in databases, with credit-based pricing and flexible consumption models, ultimately empowering users rather than vendors.